


The Pattern of Choice

by astano



Category: Glee
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-10
Updated: 2014-07-10
Packaged: 2018-02-08 06:43:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1930590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astano/pseuds/astano
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It isn’t that Cassie has a type, it’s just that she can’t seem to get away from hot brunettes with questionable dancing skills.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Pattern of Choice

It isn’t that Cassie has a type, it’s just that she can’t seem to get away from hot brunettes with questionable dancing skills. It’s a pattern she first begins to notice after Brody, although two people are not exactly a great enough number to declare a pattern, so she doesn’t really think all that much about it. What she does think a great deal about is how easy it was for Brody to get her into bed that first time. Easy enough that it almost makes her cringe.

In her defence, she had been having a really bad day—all those damn freshmen with their ridiculous wide-eyed enthusiasm had just worn her down to the point where she needed someone to distract her.

All in all, it boils down to the fact that Brody’s there, he’s attractive, and she knows she won’t ever get attached. 

~

When that fizzles out, there’s a girl.

The first time they meet is when Cassie subs for the Tuesday night ballet class. After an absolutely abysmal first half, she tears into the entire group for being incompetent idiots, with less natural grace than a toddler just learning to walk. The girl, Santana, tears right back into her, telling her that perhaps they’d be a little better if they had a teacher who had more interest in teaching than thinking up new ways to humiliate them.

Cassie can’t help but be intrigued. Not many people stand up to her, and even fewer still manage it in a way that makes her actually falter--even if only for a split second.

Against her better judgement, when the girl stays behind after class and flirts her way through a five minute conversation about something so ridiculously inane Cassie can’t even remember what it was, then has the audacity to ask her out for drinks, she agrees.

One date somehow turns into six, and while she doesn’t think they’re going to end up anything serious, the sex is fantastic, and she still seems to be in need of distraction.

~

They’re at some dive bar, because it’s one of the few places where Santana won’t get carded, and her fake ID will only stand up to so much scrutiny. (And that’s another thing Cassie doesn’t really want to dwell on too much—Santana isn’t even old enough to drink, but fucking a barely legal student from an evening class she’d taught once is a damn sight better than fucking her barely legal freshman class student, and she’d come perilously close to doing that the other day, which, damn Rachel Berry and her stupidly thoughtful gift.) It’s their fourth drink of the evening, and she’s about to suggest they move things elsewhere, but Santana will not shut up about her annoying roommates long enough for Cassie to even get a word in.

It’s not that she doesn’t care—okay, she doesn’t care at all, but she is perfectly willing to listen for a while in exchange for an orgasm—but it really has gone on for too long, and Cassie had zoned out ten minutes ago. It’s only when she hears the words ‘broadway’ and ‘audition’ and ‘won’t shut up with her practicing at all hours’ that she tunes in again.

“Wait,” she says, and she really can not believe it, because it just seems like she can never escape. “Is your roommate Rachel _Berry_?”

“Uh, have you not been listening?” Santana rolls her eyes and then seems to put things together a moment later—things that should have been put together at least five dates ago, which, god fucking damn it, why does Cassie always seem to end up with the dumb hot ones? “Oh,” Santana continues, eyes going almost comically wide. “ _Oh_.”

“How could you not realise…”

“It’s not like she generally speaks about you on a first-name basis, it’s all ‘Ms. July this’, ‘Ms. July that’,” Santana says defensively. “I didn’t even know your last name until the other day and forgive me for not being able to put it all together when you had your hand two seconds away from being up my skirt.” There’s an eye roll again, then, “Oh, Rachel is so not going to be okay with this.”

Cassie bites down on her lip, hard, to stop herself from saying anything too bitchy. When she actually thinks about it, it really probably isn’t Santana’s fault. “You think?”

“I’m pretty sure she has the biggest crush on you. I mean, I don’t think she realises it, and it’s probably nothing more than some fucked up version of hero worship or something, but she made me get up at six in the morning so she could drag me around a goddamn Broadway flea market to find a stupid thank you gift for you… Who does that?”

Rachel. Apparently. And that is the last thing Cassie needs to know. She finishes her drink in one long swallow and gets up from the table. Santana just stares at her until she arches her brow impatiently and nods in the direction of the door.

~

It turns out that this time, orgasms are not going to be enough to drive Rachel Berry out of Cassie’s head.

~

She hears through one of the other professors that Rachel got a callback for Fanny. She’s not hurt at all that Rachel doesn’t feel the need to come to tell her in person, and if she’s a little more vicious towards one of her freshman classes than usual that afternoon, well they deserved it completely.

The end of the day can’t come soon enough, which of course means that it drags on beyond the point where it’s bearable. Cassie’s finally done with all her classes and is just finishing up the last few bits of office work she needs to do before she can go home and indulge in the glass of wine and steaming hot bath she’s been daydreaming about for the last three hours.

The knock on the door is unexpected, and Cassie jumps, startled, and looks up quickly, ready to make whoever dares interrupt her outside of her office hours wish they’d never been born. She’s not at all prepared, then, when it’s Rachel standing just inside the room.

“Hi, Ms. July.”

Rachel’s smiling, and there’s this—Cassie won’t call it a fucking _glow_ , but, God, there’s something, and it makes Rachel look amazing in a way that heats Cassie’s cheeks, and there’s this pull in her chest that she can’t even begin to control, telling her to stand up, and move across the room. Do something stupid.

She compromises, because she’s completely incapable of ignoring the feeling completely, and gets up, coming to stand in front of her desk.

“Schwimmer.”

Suddenly, Rachel’s across the room, and almost launching herself into Cassie’s arms. “I got a callback!”

Cassie’s breath leaves her in a loud exhale, her arms instinctively reaching around to support Rachel, who nearly tumbles over in her enthusiasm. She’s smiling widely and Cassie can’t help but smile back. “Congratulations, Rachel. I knew you had it in you.”

“I just wanted to thank you,” Rachel says then, and Cassie starts to reply, starts to tell Rachel she already did, but then Rachel’s head darts forwards, and her lips press against Cassie’s cheek. The contact lasts for a millisecond—no time at all—but it’s enough to close up Cassie’s throat, and her words die away instantly.

Cassie doesn’t know where Rachel got the balls to be so familiar, but then it’s hard to think clearly about anything when she can still feel the burn of Rachel’s lips against her cheek, and there’s that urge to do something stupid rearing its ugly head again. She used to have much better control than this.

She’s still staring at Rachel, and from the way Rachel’s looking back, she probably has some ridiculous look on her face, but she can’t seem to snap herself out of it. Where there was always a biting retort just waiting to leave her lips, there’s nothing at all except the stupid, insane need to—

Rachel finally starts to say something but her words are lost to Cassie’s ears, because she’s tilting her head down, pressing her mouth against Rachel’s. Rachel jerks, startled, in her arms, and Cassie braces herself for the inevitable outrage, which she knows she completely deserves. It’s almost a shock, then, when Rachel just makes this little helpless noise in the back of her throat, tightens her arms around Cassie’s back and reaches up, her lips finding Cassie’s again and again.

Cassie finds herself being pressed backwards with the intensity of Rachel’s kisses, until she’s  trapped firmly between the hard, cold edge of her desk behind, and the soft warmth of Rachel’s body in front. Rachel’s mouth opens against her own and it’s hot and wet and perfect. She aches to feel more of Rachel against her, and her fingers start to push up against the hem of Rachel’s top, until she can splay them against the softness of Rachel’s bare skin.

And it’s almost as if that contact breaks them out of the moment, because Rachel jumps like Cassie’s fingers burned her. Her eyes dart over Cassie’s face wildly as she steps backwards.

“What are we… you’re my… I’m…” She stumbles over her words and then her own feet as she backs quickly out of Cassie’s office, and Cassie’s left stunned and alone, the faint ache between her legs and the sound of her own harsh breathing the only thing letting her believe the last five minutes hadn’t been a dream.

~

Cassie gets her bath and her glass of wine later, just as she’d been daydreaming about, but it’s hard to relax when all she can do is replay the scene in her office over and over again. One moment she’s berating herself for her complete lack of control, and the next she’s remembering the feeling of Rachel’s hands in her hair or the taste of her lips.

It’s enough to drive her crazy, and she’s just about given up on the idea of her bath in favour of drowning her thoughts with more wine when the intercom buzzes. Ridiculously, she thinks at first that it might be Rachel, and she feels suddenly lighter for the split second before she realises Rachel has no idea where she lives. And the only person who ever turns up unannounced is Santana, which…

The intercom buzzes again, and Cassie has no idea how a machine can sound angry, but it does, so despite being in absolutely no mood for company, she steps out of the bath, grabbing a towel as she passes them and buzzes Santana in.

In the time it takes for Santana to make her way up three flights of stairs, Cassie manages to dry herself off and pull on some sweats, so she’s at least decent when Santana barges through the door.

“Firstly,” Santana says, in a tone of voice that makes Cassie immediately want to tell her to shut the fuck up, “this little thing we’ve had going on is over right now, because my friendship with Rachel? I value that so much more than I do a few orgasms. And secondly, whatever the fuck you did to Rachel to make her spend the last two hours crying on our sofa, you need to fix, right fucking now.”

“Santana…” Cassie wants to lash out, tell Santana to get the hell out of her apartment, but all she can manage is the warning tone of her voice as she sinks down into a chair. She’s too drunk, she thinks, to deal with this, but then she’s only had one glass of wine, so maybe, maybe she’s just tired of everything. “I kissed her,” she says, when it becomes obvious Santana’s still waiting for her to say something.

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

Something seems to click inside Santana then, like she finally realises that yes, actually, Cassie is capable of honest to God human emotion. She steps a little further into Cassie’s apartment, looking almost like she might be on the verge of laughing—which, no one fucking laughs at Cassie in her own fucking apartment—or, even worse, like she might want to sympathise with her.

Neither response is remotely okay, and Cassie all but growls, “Don’t you even—”

In the end, Santana just kind of shakes her head and shrugs. “I’ve got to get to work,” she says, “but Rachel’s on her own until our roommate comes back from his date, so, y’know, if you want to do anything about the fact that Rachel obviously has _some_ kind of feelings for you…”

~

About thirty seconds after Santana leaves, Cassie gets a text through from her just containing an address. It’s pathetic, really, that it only takes her about fifteen seconds to decide she’s going.

The trip across from her apartment to Bushwick takes about 25 minutes. Cassie sits in the subway car and spends the entire ride wondering just what, exactly, she’s thinking. It’s not like her career can afford another knock, and starting a relationship with her _student_ , one that’s not just about sex, well, she’s pretty sure she might be certifiable.

But she’d tried telling herself she hated Rachel. And when that didn’t work, she’d tried telling herself it was only an attraction, that it didn’t mean anything. She doesn’t have any excuses left.

When Cassie gets to Rachel’s building, she takes the stairs, because it gives her an extra minute or so to think about what she’s going to say, and she figures she needs all the time she can get.

She still doesn’t have anything really planned out by the time she’s knocking on the door. When Rachel answers, they just end up staring at each other for a long few seconds before Rachel turns around and walks back inside. Cassie follows.

“Rachel,” she starts to say, at the same time Rachel looks up at her and asks, “Why?”

“It’s not like I planned to,” Cassie says, immediately on the defensive. She’s beginning to hate that that’s the place she always goes to first.

“Do you just try to sleep with all of your students? Because first there was Brody, and don’t think Santana hasn’t told me about what was going on with you and her.”

“I’m not going to apologise for that.”

“No, I didn’t really expect you too.”

Cassie takes a breath and lets it out slowly, then walks through the apartment to sit down on the sofa next to Rachel. “I didn’t do any of that to deliberately hurt you,” she offers. “If it makes it hurt any less, I didn’t know Santana was your friend when we started seeing each other.”

“That’s not even—” Rachel shakes her head. “You slept with my boyfriend _and_ my roommate and yet I’m still talking to you. Still entertaining the idea of—I don’t even know what I’m doing. And you—you were horrible to me for months and—It’s not just going to make it suddenly okay when you tell me it was for my own good. I mean, I get it, I do, but it’s not _okay_ , it’s not—”

“I know. I know I’m not the nicest person to be around. I don’t even want to be most of the time—”

“I’m not asking you to be,” Rachel says. She smiles at Cassie then, for just a second, and Cassie feels like she can’t quite breathe. “But then sometimes you are, when it really matters, and… These last few days—when I got the call back you were one of the first people I wanted to tell, but I couldn’t reach you straight away. I wanted to tell you so bad.”

“Rachel…”

“I don’t even know what I’m saying, except… I think it means something, that it was _you_ I wanted to tell. Even before my dads. I don’t know why, but… Tell me right now if you don’t want to try this, try to work out what is going on between us, because I think I _do_ , and—”

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want that,” Cassie says, interrupting Rachel with a hand on her arm. 

And this is almost foreign to her, it’s been so long since she’s wanted someone quite so much on more than the most basic level. But then Rachel’s hand comes to cover her own, small fingers slipping between hers, and something settles in Cassie’s chest.  “Of course I do,” she says again. Then Rachel’s kissing her, and Cassie knows then that she’ll do whatever it takes to make this work. She has to, because sitting here in a Bushwick loft with Rachel’s palm sliding against her cheek, lips opening gently against her own, she finally feels like she’s where she’s supposed to be.


End file.
